Organization Tips for the Kitchen

Be afraid. Be very afraid. We are going to venture into one of the most cluttered, messy, dare I say “cruddy” areas of many homes.

It’s your kitchen. And why should a kitchen be such a mess?

The kitchen can get to be a huge mess because:

• There are many things stored in a kitchen
• Most of us are always in an enormous hurry in the kitchen – gotta run, gotta run, gotta run, run, run to the grocery store, playgroup, school, work, etc.
• There’s a lot of food, dirty dishes and garbage in the kitchen and this stuff does go bad and get smelly if we don’t do something about it.

Schedule a block of time, turn on the stereo or turn on the kitchen TV, and get down to business: the business of organizing your kitchen.

Here are some organizing tips to help you out.

Kitchen Drawers

No – you can’t nail the junk drawer shut. Open it up. Take out the stuff you never use and throw it out.

Yes, get rid of all those old bread bag ties, the screw you found under the dishwasher two dishwashers ago and the extra ring top to the baby bottle (the baby is 21.)

Take out stuff that you don’t need in the kitchen and put it where you need it. Wipe out the drawer and call it that drawer something else. No more junk.

Open another drawer. It’s hard to find one utensil when it’s mashed in a drawer with thirty other utensils.

First of all, the one you want will always be under everything else, in the back, in the dark. That’s life.

Secondly, there will be a spatula jammed to the top of the drawer so you have to wiggle that out first even to open the drawer.

Buy some drawer organizers for stuff you would like to keep in a drawer and throw out broken utensils and the spatula you half-melted last year by leaving it in the hot frying pan.

Clean the Counters

Put all the tools you use near the stove in a pretty vase or utensil container.

You’ll save steps and you won’t be running to find something to flip the pancakes as they burn to a crisp.

Hang your measuring cups and spoons – preferably near your stove or baking area. No more searching for the teaspoon measure.

Set up organized zones. Do you bake? Keep your baking items in one area. Find a good place for the baking pans and cookie sheets.

Get attractive canisters and fill them with flour and sugar and such and keep them in the pantry or your baking area.

And don’t forget other great organized areas like the bar area, the cleaning area and the recycling and trash area.

Organizing Cabinets

Do you risk injury just by opening the cabinet door? How many old ricotta and margarine containers tumbled out and hit you in the head?

Recycle them. Yes. Just do it. Then go to the store and buy some of those nice, nesting containers with lids that snap together. Voila. Organization.

And just think, your container cabinet is now a no-risk zone.

Get rid of old stuff. Do you really need the artichoke hearts in the dented container that expired ten years ago?

Yeah, so, you WERE going to make that good artichoke heart recipe. Get rid of that can. And get rid of anything else that’s out of date.

Cleaning the Refrigerator

Then there’s the refrigerator. This is the great black hole. Just get out some of those big yellow, elbow length rubber gloves and remove old stuff. If it smells funny it’s old stuff. If it’s out of date it’s old stuff.

Now clean the shelves and arrange the refrigerator in some way that makes sense to you. If you like hot sauce on your eggs, maybe the hot sauce should be near the eggs. We all have preferences, right?

Okay, take a break. Have a cup of tea. These were just a few ideas to get you started. There are a lot more, but I don’t want to overwhelm you.

So enjoy the tea. I know you can hardly wait to hear the rest of my kitchen organization ideas.